Weeks Thirty-One & Thirty-Two at the Maryland State Archives

Weeks Thirty-One & Thirty-Two at the Maryland State Archives

Last week I attended the MARAC spring meeting in Cape May, New Jersey. It was wonderful to meet archivists from the region. There were also some really interesting sessions on outreach to students. I attended a workshop on teaching archival literacy with primary source materials to college students. As part of the workshop, we began working on standards for archival literacy, building from ACRL’s information literacy standards. I hope this document will be completed and become a resource for archivists. I also attended a great session where Brooklyn Historical Society staff shared their many outreach programs. They do programming with children as young as kindergarteners up to college-age. Unfortunately, some of their funding sources, such as Library of Congress Teaching American History grants, no longer exist but they are hopeful that they will find money to continue with their programs. Another informative program was a session on processing large collections. The presenters shared their strategies for project management as they tackled collections with boxes numbering over 1,000.

At MARAC, I also had the opportunity to meet other members of SNAP (the Students and New Archival Professionals Roundtable of SAA). I recommend joining SNAP as it’s a very welcoming group. Plus, they will be electing new leaders at the annual meeting this summer, which will be a great opportunity for newcomers to assume leadership positions in a professional association. The SNAP listserv hosted by SAA, Facebook page, and Twitter feed are all easy ways to stay in the loop with roundtable activities.

Last week and the week prior, I also continued to work on Maryland State Colonization Society case studies. I also had a chance to skim through some the 1940 U.S. Census records. Occasionally, our project does biographies of 20^th century individuals so these census records will be a rich source of information.

Krystal